Is Musk Losing Wall Street?

Fore years Wall Street has ceaselessly promoted Elon Musk and Tesla. But last night, on a quarterly earnings conference call the already strained bond between analysts and the Tesla CEO may have been broken beyond repair. After being asked some questions he didn’t like, Musk said “Next. Next. Next. Boring bonehead questions are not cool. Next.”

The FT reports what happened next.

The next 20 minutes of the call was devoted to questions from Galileo Russell, who hosts a YouTube channel called HyperChange TV and had campaigned via Twitter beforehand to be able to field questions to “give retail investors a voice”.

Mr Musk’s irritation came after Tesla reported that losses on the Model 3 and capital spending consumed $1.1bn in the first quarter of this year, a slightly higher rate of cash burn than Wall Street had been expecting.

The company’s cash balances fell by $700m in the period, leaving it with $2.7bn. Rating agency Moody’s has predicted that further depletion during the year would force Tesla to return to the capital markets in order to rebuild a financial cushion.

After the call Tesla’s shares sold off 5%. Read more about Musk’s bizarre behavior here.

Elon Musk berates ‘bonehead’ questions

Jeremy Jones, CFA

Jeremy Jones, CFA is the Director of Research at Young Research & Publishing Inc., and the Chief Investment Officer at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. Jeremy is a contributing editor of youngresearch.com.